


scrapbook pasts & cobwebbed heads

by myvoidedeyes



Series: (we are) lost boys [8]
Category: Hemlock Grove
Genre: AU, Angst, Character Study, Dysfunctional Family, Established Relationship, Family Dynamics, Grief/Mourning, Hemlock Grove - Freeform, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M, Past Character Death, Reminiscing, Romancek, Suicidal Thoughts, Unhappy Ending, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Upir, in the context of the series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-08
Updated: 2018-09-08
Packaged: 2019-07-08 08:59:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15927134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myvoidedeyes/pseuds/myvoidedeyes
Summary: they said time healed all wounds, but he had all the time in the world, and a thousand open wounds





	scrapbook pasts & cobwebbed heads

There’s a sort of hysterical hilarity about having watched everything you once knew turn to dust. About having nothing but faded, yellow-edged pictures to remind yourself of a past that you have no reason to hold onto.

He’d become a bitter god, his immortality too immortal, whatever humanity he’d even had in the first place long gone. The world as a whole stopped mattering when he had the time for everything to become toy blocks in his hands, eventually.

            Though he’d never admit it, pride lingering just enough to keep the thought sealed behind sewn lips, he could understand why his mother had never loved anything but herself. It was easier to be cold than to expose your soft underbelly for a blow that would always come: there was a crumbling headstone and an alienated daughter to prove as much.

            Without the anger, the roiling chaos that pulsed within his ribs, which had consumed him, fuelled him, for so long, he was just _empty_. There was no point in trying the fill it; he’d burned and been burned enough times to see as much. He just didn’t _care_ and had no desire to. Had no reasons left and have given up trying to find one.

            So, rare was it that he stepped into the quarantine of his past.

There was but a single day of the year where he migrated across the world back to the shitty, hollowed-out town he’d once called home, when home was a concept he still grasped. Where the both of them would find their way to the plot of land his lover called home and the stone roof that rested over his head, it’s few lines belying his identity. They would hold hands—looking more like siblings than the father and daughter they were—trying to preserve their memories, re-glue the bent corners, as if they could keep all the littlest details from fading. And then they would leave, drifting back into the expanse of the world, as far away as they could get from it and one another.

Sometimes, though, sometimes he found his way back to the blackened, rotting shell where his life had begun, ended, and returned anew. Stood in the open spaces and pretended he could still see back to the time before, when this path was just beginning, and things were so much simpler. When he still felt alive, even if he may not have really been, and acted out scenes from his life, building up to the moment he could finally fucking feel _something_ , escape the apathy that even drugs couldn’t touch.

 _One day,_ he’d promise himself _, one day I’ll join the ashes here._ One day he’d finally let all his ghosts and demons go from the deadened cage of his ribs. Maybe then they’ll finally stop following him, trying to find the very thing they took into themselves—took with them.

            But even that took more care than he was willing to give.          

**Author's Note:**

> I think this may be the end of 'lost boys', though I may write something from Peter's perspective to slot between this and 'broken bones & halved hearts', if only for symmetry. Whatever the case, this work holds last place in the series. I would like to thank each and every person who has taken the time to read this silly, flowery AU I started in April. I love the show, I love these boys, and it was an absolute dream to return to fanfic to give them a more fitting ending, or at least I'd think so.


End file.
